


teenage dirtbags

by inhobbok



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: 90s AU, Bisexual Nancy Wheeler, F/F, Lesbian Robin Buckley, Pining, as in there are no monsters, march/april 1995 to be exact, normal high school au, robin plays guitar, robin-centric, the plot of this fic is basically taken directly from teenage dirtbag by wheatus
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-02
Updated: 2019-08-07
Packaged: 2020-07-29 12:16:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,460
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20082055
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inhobbok/pseuds/inhobbok
Summary: Robin plays guitar and loves Jeff Buckley. Nancy is a popular girl dating Steve, the popular boy, and she barely knows Robin exists. Robin is hopelessly in love with her.Or: Hallelujah is the best song ever written, Robin is gay, and they're all just teenage dirtbags, baby.





	1. i have a dream about her.

**Author's Note:**

> hey! this fic is inspired by [this](https://inhobbok.tumblr.com/post/186716970258/theglowpt2-heterophobicluke-galaxy-brain-robin) tumblr post. i listened to phoebe bridgers' version of teenage dirtbag and this happened. enjoy!

The music room, thankfully, is empty.

Robin sets her guitar case on an empty desk and opens it up. The acoustic guitar is old and shitty, but it works. Robin, who found it in a charity shop and spent two months working double-shifts at the video store to pay for it, is pretty happy with it. The old lady who runs the shop held it for her those months, but she seemed glad to be rid of it. Robin used to go to the shop to admire it every Sunday. Yesterday was the last Sunday. It belongs to her now. She picks a couple of notes, grimaces, then sets to tuning it.

“Sounds like shit,” Vicki says. She’s using a chair to climb on top of the cabinet, the pockets of her paint-stained hoodie filled with muesli bars.

“Yeah, let me tune it and then you’ll see,” Robin mutters, twiddling the tuning peg of the A string. She tries again: much better.

There’s a ripping sound as Vicki opens a muesli bar. She takes a bite. “You want one?” she offers.

“Not hungry,” Robin answers. The D string is fine. The G sounds more like an E than anything else. She sticks her tongue out the corner of her mouth and twists the tuning peg with more force than really necessary.

“Your loss,” says Vicki.

Robin ignores her. The B and E strings are easier to tune. Maybe she’s getting better at it. She did spend three hours tuning and un-tuning the guitar yesterday. It drove her family crazy, but she’s pretty confident with it now. She sits down and rests the guitar on her knee. It curves nicely around her leg, like it was made to fit.

“What’re you going to play?” Vicki asks. An empty muesli bar wrapper flutters down from the top of the cabinet.

“Take a wild fucking guess,” Robin retorts, taking a seat on a chair and resting the guitar on her knee. She’s never played this song on this guitar, but she’s played it a thousand times on the even shittier school ones, and a couple of times on those belonging to friends. It’s not difficult to play on this. It feels meant to be. There’s no doubt that this guitar belongs to Robin.

Vicki sways in time to the song—Robin keeps glancing up at her to gauge her reaction. She’s got a little smile on her face. Robin grins and looks back down at the guitar, focusing on her finger placement. She starts to sing, “_I heard there was a secret chord_,” and looks up at Vicki.

Vicki stares back at her. “Well, don’t stop.”

Robin shrugs and keeps going all the way to, “_but you don’t really care for music, do you?_” From there her little performance remains exclusively instrumental.

Robin’s never really liked her voice. She can play guitar well, and she’s competent on the piano, but singing is not her forte. Her voice has always been a bit low, a bit raspy, and it breaks on high notes. She’ll sing in her bedroom as loud as she wants, but outside of her family only Vicki has heard her sing, and that’s out of necessity seeing how much time they spend together.

Hallelujah is a song that Robin can’t stop thinking about. It’s pure luck that she found it; she was at the music store one day after school and chose an album at random, which just happened to be Jeff Buckley’s _Grace_. Something about the cover art drew her eye, and when she realised that she had the same last name, she was convinced that it was meant to be. She went home and sat on her bed and played the first song, and immediately fell in love. Then she fell in love with every song until the sixth, which was Hallelujah. She didn’t fall in love there. It was something more. The song was suddenly her most favourite thing in the world. Four months later, it still is. It is perpetually stuck in her head.

Robin plays the same song over and over again until her fingers are nearly split open. To Vicki’s credit, she does not complain once. Robin would keep going, except the bell rings.

Robin sighs and closes her eyes, letting the last note linger in the silence after the bell. “You know who’s really ringing my bell at the moment?” she asks.

Vicki snorts at that, then coughs and swallows. “Who?”

Robin puts the guitar down on the floor and closes the guitar case around her neck so her head is in darkness. “Nancy Wheeler.”

Vicki actually laughs, her weird cackle reverberating around the room. Then she seems to realise that Robin is serious. “Oh shit, really?”

Robin opens the case a bit and drops it like a guillotine. “Yeah.”

Robin hears Vicki stuff the last half of her final muesli bar into her mouth and jump down from the cabinet. She opens the guitar case. Robin looks up at her forlornly. “Cheer up,” Vicki says. “Nancy is in our gym class.”

“I know.” _Of course I know_, Robin thinks.

Vicki hooks her arms under Robin’s shoulders and hauls her up. Robin has to respect the effort, because Vicki is a good five or six inches shorter and probably only weighs marginally more than a couple of feathers. “Up we get,” Vicki says.

Robin bends to pick up her guitar. She picks a couple of notes from a funeral march and puts it back into the case. It’s with more reverence than she ever showed in Sunday Church as a child that she fastens the case shut and slings it over her shoulder.

* * *

Robin sips from her water bottle, watching Nancy Wheeler across the netball court.

Nancy is not someone Robin would usually think about much. God knows she never thinks about her friends. In the Venn diagram of high school, they are two distant circles. But lately, especially during gym, Robin is noticing how pretty Nancy is. Right now, she’s chatting to Carol, pushing little wisps of hair out of her sweaty face. Her hair is in a ponytail fastened by a purple scrunchie, matching the stripes on her tube socks. Everything about Nancy is so effortless, right down to the brilliant white of her Keds. She’s perfection.

Robin voices this thought to Vicki. “I think she’s perfection.”

“I think you’re crazy,” Vicki says, breathing a bit more heavily than usual. She takes the water bottle from Robin and drinks about half of it in a single gulp.

Robin shrugs. “Crazy in love, maybe.”

Vicki scoffs.

Nancy is smiling at something Carol said. She laughs, and the sound sends jolts down her spine. God, even her _laugh _is pretty!

“This is bad,” Robin says. “This is really terribly bad.”

Vicki sticks her leg out in front of her and stretches to reach her toes, her nose against her knee. “What’s bad?”

Robin jerks her head in Nancy’s general direction. “She doesn’t even know me! If someone went up to her and said, hey, do you know Robin Buckley, she’d probably say, sorry, who?” Robin draws her knees up to her chin and looks glumly at the group of girls clapping their hands on Nancy’s shoulders and congratulating her on the game.

Vicki raises her eyebrows. “Why don’t you introduce yourself then, genius?”

Robin flips her off. “Fine, she knows who I am. She just doesn’t _care_.” Ouch. That hurts a lot. Apathy is worse than ignorance. Robin buries her head in her arms and pretends that she, likewise, does not care at all about Nancy Wheeler.


	2. she doesn't know who i am.

Robin twirls her pen through her fingers, staring at the back of Nancy Wheeler’s head.

Nancy’s seat is diagonally across from Robin, in front and to the left. Her hair is half-up, half-down, secured in another one of her scrunchies: it’s an orange one today. She’s writing careful notes in an exercise book covered in pink adhesive paper, pausing every now and then to look up and listen to Ms. Click lecture about the beginning of World War I. Robin can’t see her face, but she has an imagination. Is she smiling softly at her page? Is she frowning, lips pursed, concentrating? Or does she have her tongue between her teeth, focussing on keeping her handwriting neat?

The door slams open, forcing Robin out of her daydreams. Steve Harrington and his hair enter the classroom. The entire class seems to pause what they were doing in favour of paying attention to him. Robin glares at the back of his head as he mutters an apology to Ms. Click for being late—it’s the same apology he makes every class—and sits down in the empty seat directly in front of her. He leans back. Nancy surfaces from her notes to look at him. Robin can see her face now—she’s smiling at something stupid he’s doing. She looks in _love_.

Robin would give anything for Nancy to look at her like that.

It’s not just Nancy that’s looking at Steve. On Steve’s right, Tammy Thompson has her head in her hands, staring dreamily at him as a shower of bagel crumbs fall from his mouth onto the floor. Laurie Foster is pretending not to look at him, but Robin can see her obviously sneaking glances at him every now and then. Even Vicki, on Robin’s right, is looking at him. Robin makes a face at her, and she just shrugs.

Ms. Click resumes her lecture, the distraction of Steve’s arrival having passed. Robin bites the end of her pen, watching Steve lean over a scrap of paper and scribble on it. He folds it, looks around, then leans across the aisle to slip it onto Nancy’s desk. Nancy finishes writing her sentence and glances at it. She looks at Steve with a little conspiratorial grin and opens the note, only to quickly fold it in half again. Her smile turns into a scandalised frown that still betrays the fact that she’s amused by it. Robin closes her eyes and imagines what the note says. Knowing Steve, it’s probably crude and simple.

Robin could probably write something nicer. Maybe something like the fourth verse of Hallelujah, _remember when I moved in you, and the holy dove was moving too, and every breath we drew was Hallelujah_. It’s subtler and more beautiful than anything Steve Harrington could write. It’s what Nancy deserves.

Ms. Click walks to the blackboard, her heels clacking against the floor. She looks at them all suspiciously then turns her back to them, to write something on the blackboard. Steve leans across the aisle and mutters something to Nancy.

Nancy looks at Steve and giggles. Robin watches this interaction with no small amount of jealousy.

Ms. Click turns around, crossing her arms. “Harrington.”

“Sorry, Miss,” he says, sitting up straight in his chair. When she turns around again, he looks behind him and flares his nostrils and widens his eyes, a cruel imitation of Ms. Click. Nancy watches him with a certain fondness, which Robin hates.

It’s not just that Nancy is pretty. Nancy is smart—that much is obvious from the organised colourful notes she’s writing down, and the bright red A’s Robin sees on Nancy’s test papers when they get handed out. She’s also really nice. She’s not like Carol, who sneers down her nose at the geeky kids and the band kids. She even said ‘hello’ to Robin a couple of times when they happened to arrive at the classroom at the same time. Nancy is the kind of person that Robin wishes she could be friends with, but that’s not really realistic at all.

The truth is, Nancy wouldn’t notice if Robin disappeared. To her, Robin is a background character. It’s an unfortunate thing that Steve is apparently the hero in the story of Nancy’s life.

And Steve Harrington is a dick. That’s objective fact. All he’s doing is disrupting the class, and making mean jokes, and doing all the things he’s not supposed to be doing. Nancy must be blind, blindly in love, to ignore all that—the thought makes Robin’s stomach turn.

Ms. Click finishes writing on the blackboard. She’s written “Group Assignment.” Robin glances at Vicki, who is grinning at her. The whole class has wordlessly paired up with each other. Ms. Click crosses her arms.

“I will be choosing your groups,” she says. The entire class groans.

Ms. Click picks up a sheet of paper and rattles off a list of names. Vicki is unfortunately paired with Tommy. She bangs her head against the table.

Robin listens with dread. “Robin,” Ms. Click says—Robin holds her breath— “you’re with Nancy.”

Robin’s heart skips a beat. Is this the universe finally doing something good to her for once? For a minute, she thinks it’s an auditory hallucination. Then she looks at Vicki, who is making a face that can only mean one thing: _holy shit, this is it_.

Nancy turns around in her seat and smiles at Robin. Robin nearly faints.

Ms. Click finishes the list of names. “Alright, pair up everyone, I’ll hand out the assignment.”

Everyone shuffles around, switching places so they’re next to their partner. Steve Harrington gets up and goes to sit next to Amy, who is looking very please. Robin slides into his seat, her legs a bit shaky.

“Hi,” Nancy says.

“Hey,” says Robin.

The assignment is to make a poster about how World War I started. Ms. Click loves posters. Robin hates them with a passion, but she’s starting to think that this one might not be so bad.

Nancy swivels in her chair to face Robin, her legs stretching into the aisle between them. “Where d’you want to work on this? I would offer my house but my little brother’s friends are coming over, I doubt you want to deal with all that.”

Robin makes a split-second decision. “We can do it at mine,” she offers. “My parents are going out tonight, we’ll have it to ourselves.”

Nancy grins and nods. It’s the most gorgeous thing Robing has ever seen. “Sure.”

Robin gives Nancy Wheeler her home address. She never thought this day would come. Nancy keeps smiling at her as they discuss what they’ll do for the poster. Robin’s not really listening—she’s staring at Nancy Wheeler’s lips as they form the words, _Franz Ferdinand_. She blinks and forces herself to pay attention, to make a good impression on Nancy. She’s not going to waste this opportunity. Even if Nancy is straight and has a boyfriend—they could be friends, maybe, and perhaps that could one day develop into something more…

The bell rings. “See you at five,” Nancy grins.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hope you enjoyed!! if you did, please leave kudos and a comment if you have the time, your kind words mean a lot to me <33  
um, this chapter was kind of difficult to write? not much really happens, i suppose it's mostly set-up for the next chapter. but that one will be a lot more exciting!!  
i'm on tumblr @ [inhobbok](https://inhobbok.tumblr.com/).

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading!! if you enjoyed, please leave kudos and a comment if you have the time. or, alternatively, drop an ask or send a message on my [tumblr](https://inhobbok.tumblr.com).
> 
> i'm going to be updating this every week or so. i'm pretty keen to keep writing, it's fun to write in an au like this. it's only going to be five chapters in total, so depending on how i'm going with my other fic (ti amo, je t'aime, te amo) i'll probably finish this within the month.
> 
> also, hopefully you don't mind the addition of vicki? it'll probably become more exclusively robin & nancy after the first two chapters. vicki is here because robin needs someone to talk to lol.


End file.
